Chrome Goodies: SCons, Buildbot, and Skia

With a quick look I noticed that Google's new Chrome browser uses SCons as its build tool. This is great news! I've been a fan of SCons for quite a while and have used it on a number of projects. In my experience it's especially good for building native code in multiple configurations. I won't go into all of the benefits of SCons, but the fact that it's written in Python means scripting your build system is a breeze.

While SCons has been used by a number of open source projects out there and is supposedly used by some large software companies (VMWare, id Software) this is the most significant open source project using it. I've seen some Google engineers been lightly involved in the project in the past, so hopefully this will push further adoption. SCons is not without its issues, but it's head and shoulders above any other build tool I've used. Will this be one of the last nails in GNU make's coffin? I hope so.

Chrome also uses Buildbot (also written in Python) for its continuous integration system. Buildbot is another open source tool that I've used in the past and loved its easy configurability and extensibility.

Also interesting to note is that Chrome's source code includes the Skia graphics engine. Skia was a company acquired by Google in 2005 and its SGL (Scalable Graphics Library, nee Skia Graphics Library) engine serves as the core of Android's rendering system. This is pretty exciting given that there isn't a great vector graphics toolkit out there that is open source and is suitable for embedded. Mike Reed, the founder of Skia, has built something like 4 graphics toolkit companies and sold them, so the code should be quality. At present, the Skia code looks to be built only for use in Chrome, but I imagine it will be released standalone at some point. Look for Skia to appear in more Google products such as Google TV in the near future.